The present invention concerns a portable apparatus for scientific identification of an individual.
As is known, establishing identity is a matter of great legal importance. For example, in the area of criminal law, ascertaining the identity of a corpse or identifying an accused are essential elements in a process for arriving at the truth. Thus, incontrovertibly ascertaining the identity of a prisoner also allows justice to pursue its course.
In other more common aspects in everyday life, ascertaining personal identity becomes a matter of considerable relevance; consideration may be given to the phenomenon of illegal immigration, or the fairly common event of people who are stopped for judicial investigations and enquiries and who are not in a position to prove their own identity.
In the case of living persons, the current procedures provide scientific identification which more specifically involves the implementation of an identification card on which are noted descriptive, photographic, fingerprint and anthropological data of the person to be identified. In the majority of cases, even if this operation is limited to transcription of the stated generalities, the steps of applying the index fingers which have been previously pressed against an inked pad, and applying the identification photograph of the person being identified, and the compilation of the card, or the card-indexing procedure, generally take up a period of time of not less than 60 minutes on the part of the police organisation with responsibility for this. Added to that time is the period required to travel from the place where the person was stopped, to arrive at the ‘card-indexing’ point, generally a provincial office of the administrative organisation in question, and the time necessary for sending the card to an office, generally a regional office, at which processing of the data takes place. Here in particular, a fingerprint expert carries out the identification procedure. In that case, that is to say when the card-indexing operation is not effected directly at the regional office, the overall time for identification may even amount to two weeks, due to the further known delay in transmission. It is apparent that such an overall period of time can exceed the maximum period of detention for establishing identity, as is permitted by law, thus totally nullifying the effects involved.
In addition, with the current procedures and with the available equipment, it is impossible for identification of a person to be implemented at a place different from the above-indicated offices, that is to say at the station at which a person is actually detained or at an adjacent station, such as for example in a reception camp, in a mobile office, or in a railway or airport police detention centre.
In addition the actual operation of examining the fingerprints, which is carried out by experts by virtue of comparing those taken from the identification card and those on record by a procedure of scanning the cards which have been previously recorded involves a high level of error and a considerable amount of time.
The procedure also involves an operation for cleaning up the image of the fingerprint after scanning of the card document, before insertion in the database.